The Missing Link: How Political Values Matter for Global Legitimacy Beliefs

International organizations (IOs) are increasingly contested among citizens and elites. While many scholars expect people’s political values to play a key role in shaping opinions toward IOs, recent research shows mixed support for this common assumption. In this paper, we provide a novel and comprehensive analysis of this issue, exploring to what extent, how and why political values matter for legitimacy beliefs toward IOs. The paper combines observational data from the most recent round of the World Values Survey and novel experimental data from a survey-embedded experiment fielded in 6 countries. Our argument is two-fold. First, political values are linked to legitimacy beliefs in ways that vary depending on country and IO context. The complexity of this relationship helps to explain the mixed findings in existing research. Second, political values nevertheless matter for people’s legitimacy beliefs in consistent ways, by shaping their perceived ideological proximity to IOs. When people perceive an IO to hold an ideological profile that is closer to their own political values, they conceive of it as more legitimate. These findings suggest that there is a common logic to the diverse ways in which political values are linked to legitimacy beliefs toward IOs.